Much trauma is caused by unfair uses of power in groups, particularly by moderators of online communities, who often act with unfair bias. This is a place to make such cases known to try to deter them from happening.

Monthly Archives: November 2015

So even as we make this new home for this project of fairness watch, there is admin-endorsed crowd psychology going on in an aspie forum site, resulting from a fault in receipt of a private message between members – that was actually about a contribution to this project about a problem elsewhere!!

Asperclick had seemed a successful relaxed forum, until in recent months it has become swamped by frequent arguments. There are only a few members who argue obsessively but they keep swamping other members’ topic threads with it. This is a forum with sensitive members, and affected by suffering the tragic suicide of a member, known as In Dubio Veritas. That makes it a site responsible to avoid giving members despairing feelings. Yet –

An admin called Spiderman0_2 has openly committed the bullying tyrannical conduct of giving his backing to 2 members who picked an argument with another and swamped a thread with 3 days of constant repetitive hammering abuse of one other member, and pursued it into another thread too. The 2 culprits (whose usernames I will give if there is a finally unjust outcome) have been frequently filling threads with their own bickerings, it’s even open 0n site in the thread “Moving Forward” that they annoyed the site’s owner by it just 10 days before.

Yet Spiderman0_2 upheld them, in pitching in to this one other member in this intensive way, and entirely blamed the victim for its occurrence, openly in front of vulnerable sensitive members. He upheld their absurd condemnation of the victim for making a couple of small scale efforts in the forum to alert the private message’s sender to the late receipt. Obviously the victim could not be confident that his reply message would be received as a private message, so he had to do it by posting the alert in threads where the member he wanted to reach was active. The threads could have continued perfectly undisrupted, indeed one did.

Spiderman0_2 showed open hostility to believing that the message sending fault had existed, as if irrationally defensive about its occurrence even though no one was blaming the site for it. He ranted that nobody else had suffered it, in a way that would frighten into silence any other members who wanted to report that they had suffered it. Seeing how savagely and corruptly the one had been treated. Yet Spiderman0.2 himself had started a topic about another technical fault – lots of technical faults going on, you see – to do with “signatures” under members’ posts. In that topic it was proved that some members had suffered an unpredictably fluctuating fault. Their posts saying so were already there! when Spiderman0.2, failing to read them! – posted a biased aggressive rant to his victim saying there were no unpredictably changing faults, and counting this as an argument against believing in the messaging fault! This is what an arrogant roughshodly hasty closed minded fact-bending bully he is.

This article www.psychcentral.com/news/2014/10/13/suicidal-thoughts-10-times-more-likely-in-adults-with-aspergers/76016.html on suicide cited it being 10 times more likely in adults with Asperger’s. It referenced a study by the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, published 2014 in The Lancet Psychiatry, evidencing this. – “Survey data was used on 256 men and 118 women who were diagnosed by a clinician with Asperger’s syndrome between 2004 and 2013 in England. Any depression, suicidal thoughts, or plans were recorded on a self-report questionnaire, along with self-reported autistic traits and empathy. Two-thirds (66 %) of the respondents reported thoughts, 35 % reported plans or attempts, 31 % reported depression.

Compared with the general population, adults with Asperger’s syndrome were nearly 10 times more likely to report suicidal thoughts. They were also significantly more likely to have these thoughts than people with 1, 2, or more medical illnesses, or people with a psychotic illness.”

Simon Baron-Cohen was quoted as a co-author of the research: “Adults with Asperger’s syndrome often suffer with secondary depression due to social isolation, loneliness, social exclusion, lack of community services, underachievement, and unemployment. This study should be a wake-up call for the urgent need for high quality services, to prevent the tragic waste of even a single life.“

Asperclick is a community tragically impacted by this already. From which you would expect its folks to have a higher sense of the need to be a fair safe space. Yet anyone who sides with the 2 quarrel pushers and Spiderman0_2 creates exactly these conditions described by Baron-Cohen towards tragic outcomes.

At present it is a socially unsafe space. If Spiderman0_2 stands as winning, any autism service or worker or group friend who points anyone towards Asperclick points them towards risks of suicidal outcomes – which of course is a suable wrong to do. Any autistic forum where crowd psychology batters reason with admin’s indulgent approval openly proclaimed onsite, is an emotional risk and a despairing self-harm risk, to every member at all levels of vulnerability.

Only if and when Asperclick’s leadership repudiate Spiderman0_2’s actions, act to prevent their repetition, and take the side of the member who these 3 piled into, will it become a safe place to point anyone to.

A promise of a response was made by the site owner on Nov 18. It is still awaited. This is absolutely classically how web forums turn into corruptly working tyrannies. You can have no confidence in the fair running of any site, or any activity ever, where you get told to hold your tongue about a fairness issue while awaiting a promised answer – then the answer never comes.

Tern

19 to 28 Nov 2015

3 years on, the promised answer has still never come. Meanwhile I can rightly report dissuading some other folks from joining Asperclick.